This Blog Has Switched Camps

Camps never stay in one place for too long. Go to justatouchofcamp.tumblr.com for more.

Passage from "Passage"

From Section 13 of Whitman's great poem, "Passage to India": 

Passage to more than India!   
O secret of the earth and sky! 
Of you, O waters of the sea! O winding creeks and rivers!   
Of you, O woods and fields! Of you, strong mountains of my land!   
Of you, O prairies! Of you, gray rocks!   
O morning red! O clouds! O rain and snows!   
O day and night, passage to you!
   
O sun and moon, and all you stars! Sirius and Jupiter!   
Passage to you!   

Passage—immediate passage! the blood burns in my veins!   
Away, O soul! hoist instantly the anchor!   
Cut the hawsers—haul out—shake out every sail! 
Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough?   
Have we not grovell’d here long enough, eating and drinking like mere brutes?   
Have we not darken’d and dazed ourselves with books long enough?   
   
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!   
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me; 
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,   
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.   
   
O my brave soul!   
O farther, farther sail!   
O daring joy, but safe! Are they not all the seas of God? 
O farther, farther, farther sail!

80's Diet Coke Commercial (Whitney Houston)

The quality's not the greatest, but the Time Warp effect is worth it.

I Sing "The Bodyguard" Electric

As a child, "The Bodyguard" was one of my favorite movies. Five years old when it was released in 1992, I believe I have some vague memory of watching it for the first time at home, once it was released on video. From then on I can recollect asking my parents to rent me the VHS tape from the neighborhood video store, and finally I remember shelling out about 25 bucks (a small fortune then) from a Blockbuster "previously viewed" rack. Then I could watch it as much as I wanted, and I did.

This film was not an ironic source of enjoyment for me in those days. I was not aware at such a young age of flaws in unified storytelling or verisimilitude, or the frowned-upon studio practice of creating blockbuster "vehicles" for music legends, or even that "bad acting" was something easily recognizable and quite distasteful. I only knew that some things I enjoyed, others I did not. "The Bodyguard" I enjoyed sincerely enough that I wanted to watch it repeatedly.

The musical numbers contributed most of the enjoyment, I believe. It's remarkable to me that "The Bodyguard" is so frequently classified as a thriller, when really it is as much a musical as "The Sound of Music" or "My Fair Lady." I see now that the dramatics of Whitney Houston's character being stalked and threatened, and the jealous sister's suicide, and the forbidden love between a black superstar and her white protector -- these were things I could barely understand as a child. (I'm the youngest of three children, and my parents were very hands-off when it came to supervising what I watched.) I didn't need to understand them -- I had what I wanted in this film: the spectacle of Whitney Houston, at the peak of her fame, taking to the stage and issuing forth a voice unlike anything I'd heard before (or since).

Whitney & Whitman, Mother & Father (Part 2)

Biological parents are in most cases easy to locate, and once you've reached the age they were at when they had you (me, this year), then they're pretty easy to figure out. I'm not saying all the mysteries of life dissolve like the unveiling at the end of a "Scooby Doo" episode, but for once I feel like I can put my childhood behind me. There are plenty of other topics to obsess over, such as: Who are my real parents?
    By "real" of course, I mean spiritual, supernatural, artistic. And by parents I mean those two figures -- one male, one female -- that contribute equally to the genetic makeup of your innermost soul. As is the biological case, you can't choose your real parents. And they don't choose you. At some point, I believe, they choose each other, but it is not a carefully arranged courtship. It is a heated seduction. It is the sliding open of a door and a look. There eyes meet, and everything -- your birth, your life, your death -- is foretold.
    My real parents are Whitney Houston and Walt Whitman. Names are everything, and what's in a name matters as much as what that name names. I think it's significant that my parents' names share the letters "W-H-I-T" in that order, and that word spells "whit," meaning "a small amount." There is literally a small amount of Whitney Houston in Walt Whitman, and likewise there is a small amount of him in her. It's also meaningful that "whit" and "wit" are homonyms, the latter being fit to describe both my mental sharpness generally and my playful aptitude with words specifically.
    As their real child, I represent not only the manifestation of the "whit" my parents share but also what they don't. From Whitman I have inherited the right to be called a "man," despite my emotional kinship with so many women. My mother gave me "Houston," the major city nearest to where I was born, and where I currently live. I will not live in Houston for the rest of my life, but as the location of my first real apartment, real job, and real experiment with adulthood, it will always constitute a home the way other future habitations won't. The remaining letters from my parents' names, "N-E-Y" and "W-A-L-T," can be recombined in a number of ways to form significant milestones in my life so far -- "YALE" and "NY" are two -- and, I can imagine, symbols of adventures to come (maybe an "LA" or a "NEAL"?).

Whitney & Whitman, Mother & Father (Part 1)

In a world full of plurals -- men, jobs, bills, "Golden Girls" reruns -- it's not always easy to find singular truths, but one thing is at the moment certain: every person in the world has a mother and a father. Only one of each. I'm speaking in biological terms because I find it consoling, in a way, to think that we all share this basic trait -- we arise from the union of one person and another, whether that union occurs on a heart-shaped honeymoon bed, in a petri dish, or underneath the light of a candid moon. In January of 2006, as a freshman in college, I wrote this about my mother and father:

"She sees everything as either in or out of place. I want to say my mother is like a pin cushion. Fluffed and folded, she holds things in place to prevent them from being lost, to prevent the pain of misplacement. But then she is constantly on her feet, folding clothes, fluffing pillows. She straightens and cleans so that everything in front of her looks immaculate, looks intentionally placed, prepared, perfect.
    My father is the opposite. He’s natural. Better, he is made of earth. His skin is leathery, sun-tanned. His green eyes look like glowing swamp water shining through two holes in a bed of dirt. He is like an earth-god who cannot be controlled, or rather, chained, nailed down. He lets on that nothing is serious, that everything is an accident of some kind, but I can tell he knows something about the world. How old it is. How things stop mattering after a while."

    These are still my parents, although today I'd propose a theory about what catalyst enabled these two opposites to attract: laughter. "Tumultuous" fails miserably to describe the kind of relationship shared between my mother and father, who met when they were children, and yet "tumultuous" is also the best I can do. Separately they beat strange drums; together they  are a loud, screaming burst of laughter -- part gasp, part squeal, part music. At once a barbaric yawp and a voice so refined it sounds raw.

It's Good Because It's Bad: Notes on "Notes on 'Camp'"

"Life is too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it," quips Oscar Wilde in Vera, or The Nihilists, to whom Susan Sontag dedicates her "Notes on 'Camp'" -- first published in the Partisan Review in 1964 and then collected in Against Interpretation two years later. For Sontag, Wilde is a "transitional figure" in the history of Camp, which she discusses through a series of numbered "jottings" not unlike Guy Debord's notoriously opaque treatises of "Le société du spectacle," which I'm sure you've read. Sontag's Notes are exceedingly clever, insightful, thorough, and quotable; they bring to light the difficulties and paradoxes surrounding Camp without resorting to frightful jargon. In a moment I'll list a few more of my favorite excerpts, but while the subject is still Wilde I'd like to quote Sontag's #46. (Note: When she writes "dandy," she is certainly thinking of Uncle Oscar as the epitome of that type.)

46. The dandy was overbred. His posture was disdain, or else ennui. He sought rare sensations, undefiled by mass appreciation. (...) He was dedicated to "good taste."
     The connoisseur of Camp has found more ingenious pleasures. Not in Latin poetry and rare wines and velvet jackets, but in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses. Mere use does not defile the objects of his pleasure, since he learns to possess them in a rare way. Camp--Dandyism in the age of mass culture--makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass-produced object. Camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica.

I concur with Sontag's contextualizing of "good taste" by way of consigning it to a not-too-distant past, implying that to speak of such a thing nowadays (still true in 2011 as it was in 1964) is either anachronism or Camp itself. In my view, the pretensions of the wealthy and/or intellectual elite no longer qualify as "taste" as perhaps they once did before the turn-of-the-20th-century; it is usually quite boring to learn that someone has bought or argued their way into an apparently refined style -- even more so that they were born into it. And, as Sontag points out in #46 and elsewhere, the blindfolds worn toward the enjoyableness of mass-produced items represent handcrafted tedium more so than any salvageable definition of "taste."

Movie Review: The Lincoln Lawyer

This weekend I saw The Lincoln Lawyer, but I'm still wondering if it was a fictional film adapted from the pages of a bestselling Michael Connelly novel or a documentary culled from paparazzi footage of its stars Matthew McConaughey, Ryan Phillipe, William H. Macy, Josh Lucas, Marisa Tomei, and John Leguizamo. If the credits don't lie, then:

McConaughey plays Mick Haller, a sweet-talking, morally suspicious defense attorney with pores only slightly smaller than the black Lincoln Towncar he parades around Los Angeles in chauffered by Laurence Mason. (Word of advice to McConaughey: you're too young for the direct path my mind took to the Driving Miss Daisy jokes, so stay out of the sun, Tandy.) The opening scenes show us Haller is street smart (cue shady lawyer talk), street rich (cue envelopes of cash), and street sweet (cue big brother / coke whore scene), while setting us up to wonder whether he'll give "hero" instead of "antihero" when it really effing matters. In a word, he's Hollywood's idea of a lawyer. In another word, he's Matthew McConaughey.

Just Another Touch

I owe over half of my iTunes library to movie soundtracks. Start humming along with me to this song by C&C Music Factory, which I first heard in the film "Sister Act." The sound quality of that clip isn't as good, but it's worth seeing "Just a Touch of Love" lace the montage of Whoopi cleaning up the ghetto.

Now replace the word "love" with "camp," and we've got our theme song, sistah!

Camp Here

Welcome to my blog, a place where you'll Find love, Understand life, Change your mind, and Kiss boredom goodbye -- to your heart's content.

Ever since I was a kid growing up in a small, rural town in Texas, I have been drawn to things partly outlandish, partly mainstream. Amusement didn't seem to follow a logical path to me: what others found engaging I abhorred, what others found abhorrent I treasured. To my surprise, this pattern of cultivating strange tastes continued even as my surroundings radically shifted. At Yale I expected to occupy a niche among the intellectual elite, but the moment of belonging -- despite the rich variety of choice I was offered there -- came only in brief, bright flashes. A year after graduating and moving to Houston, I was hosting a party/poetry reading I called "Waltz Whitman" when a verbally astute, new friend of mine named the pattern she saw in me -- "just a touch of camp." I knew what "camp" was, but for no good reason I'd never thought much about how it related to me. Instantly, however, I saw that she was right. "Camp," strictly defined (which it probably shouldn't be), does not summarize everything about me, but I have found no other word that comes closer to describing the strange yet banal, colorful yet gloomy, anarchic yet precise set of cultural artifacts and aesthetic objects I store in my ever-widening Santa's sack of beloved gifts. More importantly, what had seemed like an increasingly isolated life of re-watching "The Craft," jamming out to The Pointer Sisters, and toting "X-Men" comics to darkly lit dive bars began to seem less lonely. There are untold numbers of campers out there, each of them secretly yearning to kick off their Sunday shoes and enjoy life not for what it could be but for what it is -- ostentatiously, senselessly, fabulously flawed.

Visit often. Leave hungry.